Identity politics : lesbian feminism and the limits of community
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Identity politics : lesbian feminism and the limits of community
（Women in the political economy）
Temple University Press, 1989
Available at 6 libraries
Note
Bibliography: p. 191-200
Includes index
入力は遡及データによる
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"Lesbian feminism began and has fueled itself with the rejection of liberalism...In this rejection, lesbian feminists were not alone. They were joined by the New Left, by many blacks in the civil rights movement, by male academic theorists...What all these groups shared was an intense awareness of the ways in which liberalism fails to account for the social reality of the world, through a reliance upon law and legal structure to define membership, through individualism, through its basis in a particular conception of rationality." In tracing how lesbian feminism came to be defined in uneasy relationships with the Women's Movement and gay rights groups, Shane Phelan explores the tension between liberal ideals of individual rights and tolerance and communitarian ideals of solidarity. The debate over lesbian sado-masochism - an expression of individual choice or pornographic, anti-feminist behavior? - is considered as a test case. Phelan addresses the problems faced by "the woman-identified woman" in a liberal society that presumes heterosexuality as the biological, psychological, and moral standard.
Often silenced by laws defining their sexual behavior as criminal and censured by a medical establishment that persists in defining homosexuality as perversion, lesbians, like blacks and other groups, have fought to have the same rights as others in their communities and even in their own homes. Lesbian feminists have also sought to define themselves as a community that would be distinctly different, a community that would disavow the traditional American obsession with individual advancement in the world as it is. In this controversial study of political philosophy and the women's movement, Phelan argues that "the failure to date to produce a satisfying theory and program for lesbian action is reflective of the failure of modern political thinking to produce a compelling, nonsuspect alternative to liberalism." Author note: Shane Phelan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 1. Liberalism and Its Problems 2. Lesbianism and Medical Discourse 3. The Woman-Identified Woman 4. Definition and Community 5. Pornography: Male Violence and Female Desire 6. Sadomasochism and the Meaning of Feminism 7. The Limits of Community 8. Rethinking Identity Politics Notes Bibliography Index
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